Notable U.S. Supreme Court Decisions of the 2013–14 Term

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Media coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2013–14 term was dominated by four cases decided by the court in early April and late June, beginning with McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission (April 2), in which the court struck down key provisions of the 1971 Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), as amended beginning in 1974. In Town of Greece v. Galloway (June 26), the court endorsed a town council’s long practice of beginning regular public meetings with an explicitly Christian prayer, and in National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning (June 26), it ruled for the first time on the meaning of the Constitution’s recess-appointments clause. And in what was arguably the blockbuster case of the term, Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. (June 30), the court held for the first time that some for-profit corporations are capable of exercising religion. The court also issued several other significant decisions in cases concerning affirmative action, labour law, freedom of speech, freedom of association (also the focus of McCutcheon), and privacy, among other constitutional issues.

McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission was only the second case on campaign-finance law heard by the Roberts court, led from 2005 by Chief JusticeJohn G. Roberts, Jr. As did the earlier case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), McCutcheon bitterly divided generally conservative and libertarian defenders of freedom of speech and association from generally liberal champions of campaign-finance reform. While the former hailed the decision as another victory for the First Amendment, the latter condemned it as another illegitimate attack on laws designed to limit the pernicious influence of money in American politics.

The question before the court in McCutcheon was the constitutionality of FECA amendments, including those introduced by the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA), that had imposed limits on aggregatemonetary contributions by individuals to multiple federal candidates, political-party committees, and political action committees (PACs). (FECA’s limits on contributions by individuals to single candidates and committees, the so-called base limits, were not at issue in the case.) In a 5–4 decision written by Roberts, the court found that, contrary to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Buckley v. Valeo (1976), such aggregate limits imposed “significant First Amendment costs” and therefore could not be justified unless they were necessary to prevent actual or apparent political corruption. As it had insisted in Citizens United, however, the court stressed that such corruption must be understood as simple quid pro quo corruption—that is, “a direct exchange of an official act for money.” A payment of money that merely results in increased access to, or influence over, an officeholder or that ingratiates an officeholder to a donor does not constitute corruption, the court declared.

From that construal of corruption it follows, the court continued, that aggregate limits can be constitutional only if they prevent circumvention of the base limits on contributions to single candidates, committees, or PACs. The problem, the court then asserted, was that the aggregate limits did not prevent circumvention of the base limits in any meaningful way. The various proposed schemes by which such circumvention might take place were all either prohibited under laws and regulations implemented since Buckley or simply “divorced from reality”—so implausible as not to merit serious consideration. Again citing Buckley, the court concluded that the aggregate limits “intrude without justification on a citizen’s ability to exercise ‘the most fundamental First Amendment activities.’ ”

In a major establishment-clause case, Town of Greece v. Galloway, the court held that the town council of Greece, N.Y., had not breached the wall separating church and state by beginning the vast majority of its public monthly meetings over a nine-year period with a sectarian prayer delivered by clergy invited from local Christian congregations. In a 5–4 opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the court found that the practice was consistent with the country’s long tradition of “legislative prayers” delivered at the opening of sessions of state legislatures and the federal Congress. That tradition had been recognized by the Supreme Court in Marsh v. Chambers (1983), which upheld such prayers in the Nebraska state legislature. In County of Allegheny v. American Civil Liberties Union, Greater Pittsburgh Chapter (1989), however, the Supreme Court held that its prohibition of the display of a crèche and a menorah on government property during Hanukkah and Christmastime was not inconsistent with Marsh, because Marsh had been premised on the fact that Nebraska’s legislative prayers were nonsectarian. In Town of Greece, the court now held that the Allegheny court’s interpretation of Marsh was incorrect: Marsh required not that legislative prayers be nonsectarian but only that they not, in that decision’s words, “proselytize or advance any one, or … disparage any other, faith or belief.” The Allegheny court also erred in its adoption of the “endorsement” test, which had long been used (along with other tests) by the Supreme Court for determining whether a law or government practice with respect to religion was in violation of the establishment clause. What should have been applied, a majority of the justices now agreed, was the “coercion” test, whereby the establishment clause is violated only if the law or practice has the effect of coercing belief in or support of a particular religion. Although the majority was divided on exactly what ought to constitute coercion in the present case, a plurality held that a “pattern of prayers” is coercive if over time it serves to proselytize or to denigrate a particular religion or if members of other faiths or of no faith are required to participate in the prayers or are criticized for not doing so, among other restrictions.

Supreme Court town council prayer caseTom Lynch delivers a Bahaʾi prayer at the start of a meeting of the town council of Greece, N.Y., August 20, 2013. Lynch was invited to deliver the prayer after two residents of Greece filed a lawsuit challening the town council's long-standing practice of beginning its meetings with sectarian prayers led by local Christian clergy.Adam Fenster—Reuters/Landov

The court’s historic ruling in National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning marked its first interpretation of the recess-appointments clause of the U.S. Constitution, which grants the president the power to fill vacancies in high executive and judicial offices during periods when the Senate, which normally confirms such appointments, is not in session (“The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session”). The immediate consequence of the decision was that the appointments of three commissioners to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) by Pres. Barack Obama in January 2012 were rendered invalid. In a unanimous (9–0) ruling written by Justice Stephen Breyer, the court held that the president lacked the constitutional authority to make those appointments when he did. The justices disagreed, however, on the question of why Obama lacked that power. The complex rationale of the majority (5–4) was based on three interpretive conclusions regarding the recess-appointments clause: (1) the term “Recess of the Senate” refers to any recess the Senate may take during or between formal enumerated sessions of Congress and not merely to a recess between formal enumerated sessions, provided that the recess is at least 10 days long; (2) the term “Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate” refers to vacancies that may exist during the recess in which they are filled and not merely to vacancies that happen to arise during that recess; and (3) “for purposes of the Recess Appointments Clause, the Senate is in session when it says that it is, provided that, under its own rules, it retains the capacity to transact Senate business”—even if the “session” in question is merely pro forma, “with no … business transacted.” In the majority’s view, Obama’s appointments took place during a three-day recess between pro forma sessions of the Senate during a formal enumerated session of Congress. They were therefore invalid because the recess was not long enough.

The court’s much-anticipated ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., issued on the final day of the 2013–14 term, established that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) of 1993 permitted for-profit corporations that are closely held (e.g., owned by a family) to exempt themselves on religious grounds from laws that would otherwise require them to pay for coverage of certain contraceptives in their employees’ health insurance plans. The court’s ruling was based on its finding that closely held for-profit corporations themselves, in addition to their owners and officers, are “persons” under the RFRA.

The individual plaintiffs in the case—the family owners of two for-profit corporations, Hobby Lobby (an arts-and-crafts retailer) and Mardel Christian & Education Stores, Inc. (a chain of Christian bookstores)—had alleged that the imminent enforcement of the “contraceptive mandate”—a regulation by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) pursuant to the Affordable Care Act (ACA; 2010) that required companies with 50 or more employees to provide insurance coverage of all 20 contraceptive methods then approved by the FDA—would infringe on their own and their companies’ rights under the RFRA. The latter prohibited the government from “substantially burden[ing] a person’s exercise of religion” unless “application of the burden … is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest” and is “the least restrictive means of furthering that … interest.” The plaintiffs also contended that the ACA regulation would violate their own and their companies’ right to free exercise of religion under the First Amendment (“Congress shall make no law … prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]”).

The basis of the family’s complaint was their medically inaccurate belief that four of the FDA-approved methods—two types of “morning-after” pill and two types of intrauterine device (IUD)—were abortifacients. On that ground the family asserted that paying for insurance coverage of those methods would be tantamount to facilitatingabortion and would therefore be inconsistent with their own and their companies’ Christian faith. They further argued that in view of the substantial tax penalties imposed for noncompliance, the mandateconstituted a “substantial burden” on their own and their companies’ exercise of religion—a violation of both the RFRA and the free-exercise clause.

In a 5–4 decision written by Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., the court agreed with the individual plaintiffs that their for-profit corporations could be persons within the meaning of the RFRA, that the contraceptive mandate imposed a substantial burden on the religious exercise of both the plaintiffs and their companies, and that the contraceptive mandate was not the least-restrictive means by which the government could have advanced its compelling interest in providing free access to the four contraceptive methods in question. The court thus concluded that the contraceptive mandate was unlawful under the RFRA. (Having struck down the mandate on statutory grounds, the court deemed it unnecessary to decide whether the mandate was also unconstitutional under the free-exercise clause.)

In an important affirmative-action case, Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, the court upheld a Michigan state constitutional amendment, approved by voters in 2006, that barred any consideration of race in the admissions policies of state colleges and universities. The amendment had been challenged on the basis of the “political-process doctrine,” articulated by the Supreme Court in Washington v. Seattle School Dis. No. 1 (1982), which deemed it generally impermissible (a violation of the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment) for voters to curtail or override the normal processes by which policies designed to protect the constitutional rights of racial minorities are developed. In a 6–2 decision written by Justice Kennedy (Justice Elena Kagan did not take part), the court rejected the political-process doctrine and implicitly overruled Seattle, holding that the wisdom of race-based admissions in higher education was properly a matter for the voters to decide. Any holding to the contrary, the court expansively asserted, would be an “unprecedented restriction” on the collective right of citizens “to debate so they can learn and decide and then, through the political process, act in concert to try to shape the course of their own times and the course of a nation that must strive always to make freedom ever greater and more secure.”

In Harris v. Quinn, the court all but overturned a foundational labour-law ruling of nearly 40 years’ standing, Abood v. Detroit Bd. of Ed. (1977), in which the Supreme Court had held that nonunion public-sector employees may be compelled to pay service fees to a union to help fund its collective-bargaining activities on their behalf. In Harris the court declared that the Abood ruling was “questionable on several grounds,” a clear hint that it would have reversed that ruling had it not been able to answer the question before it in any other way.

The plaintiffs in Harris, a group of nonunion in-home personal aides who provided paid assistance to injured, disabled, or elderly adults, had alleged that their freedoms of speech and association were violated by the “fair share” provision of the state’s Public Labor Relations Act (PLRA), which permitted collective-bargaining agreements between the state and labour unions to include clauses requiring nonunion state employees to pay service fees to the union representing their bargaining unit. In a 5–4 opinion written by Alito, the court reversed and remanded (returned for reconsideration) a lower court’s holding that the fair-share provision as applied to personal assistants was constitutional because the aides were state employees within the meaning of Abood.

The court first argued that Abood did not apply to personal assistants, because they were not “full-fledged” public employees but only “partial” or “quasi” public employees, a legal category introduced by Alito to distinguish public employees who are paid but not directed or evaluated by the state and who do not enjoy the normal rights and benefits of full-fledged employees, such as health insurance and paid vacations. For that reason, and because the Abood ruling itself was questionable, “We refuse to extend Abood to the new situation now before us,” the court declared. Applying “generally applicable First Amendment standards,” the court instead found that the fair-share provision was unconstitutional, because it did not serve a compelling state interest that could not be achieved by any less-restrictive means.

In a number of other significant rulings, the court held that states may not use a fixed IQ score of 70 as a threshold for determining whether an individual convicted of murder is ineligible for the death penalty by reason of intellectual incapacity—“Intellectual disability is a condition, not a number,” the court declared (Hall v. Florida); that police must obtain a search warrant in order to view digital information stored on the mobile phone of an arrested individual (Riley v. California); that police may conduct a warrantless search of a residence occupied by two persons, one of whom consents to the search and the other of whom objects, provided that the permission of the consenting individual is given well after the objecting individual has been removed from the scene (Fernandez v. California); that an Ohio state law banning statements about an electoral candidate’s voting record that are known to be false can be challenged by groups that are not currently facing prosecution under that statute (Susan B. Anthony List v. Driehaus); that a Massachusetts state law that prohibited standing on a “public way or sidewalk” within 35 ft (10.7 m) of an entrance or a driveway to a reproductive health clinic is a violation of the freedom of speech of antiabortion protesters (McCullen v. Coakley); and that police may pull over a motorist who is not driving erratically or violating any traffic laws, solely on the basis of an anonymous tip that “creates reasonable suspicion” that the motorist might be intoxicated (Navarette v. California).